Nobel laureate visits graphenea

Last week, Nobel laureate Dudley R. Herschbach payed a visit to Graphenea. Dudley Robert Herschbach is an American chemist at Harvard University. He won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi "for their contributions concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes." Herschbach and Lee specifically worked with molecular beams, performing so-called "crossed molecular beam" experiments that enabled a detailed molecular-level understanding of many elementary reaction processes.

Dudley R. Herschbach in our lab.

The team at Graphenea was delighted to show Mr. Herschbach around the labs. Professor Herschbach in turn enjoyed admiring everything related to graphene – our CVD system, the barely visible layer of monoatomic graphene on Si/SiO2 substrates, and our large-scale capabilities for graphene oxide and reduced graphene oxide. Our monolayer graphene can cover an entire four-inch wafer, while on smaller wafers we can control precisely the number of layers, enabling the customer to choose whether he wants just one, two, or three atoms of carbon stacked on top of a substrate. Furthermore, Mr. Herschbach was impressed to see that we routinely make single atomic layers suspended over a TEM grid.

In the course of his life's work in research, Herschbach has published over 400 scientific papers. Herschbach's research has ranged broadly over the field of chemical physics, including much theoretical work on dimensional scaling – hence his interest in low-dimensional materials, such as graphene.